New technologies are for the first time making the concept of digitizing full-length feature films feasible using an instrument known in the film industry as a telecine. Originally, the conversion from recorded film to an electronic format was realized in a process essentially analogous to television recording. Recorded film was first uniformly illuminated and the image frames then recorded using a conventional television image tube. In a similar approach, the film frames were scanned by imaging a CRT onto each frame, while recording the output intensity.
With the advent of analog-to-digital (A/D) converter technology, transforming image signals in real time and performing image processing has become more viable. However, until the development of commercially cost effective, high density digital storage media, the image output had to be reconverted back to analog form for recording.
Further improvement has been obtained in the digitization process of recorded films with the maturation of high quality solid state detectors. One such detector is a Charge Coupled Device ("CCD") array. Having increased sensitivity, CCD arrays enable several features including frame capturing. CCDs also decouple the A/D conversion process, with the exposure and readout steps being executed as separate procedures.
Together with high performance processing and digital storage advances, the state-of-the-art of telecine has now advanced to The Cineon.RTM. system by Kodak.RTM.. This known telecine design captures digital film information at near film-grain resolution, allows image manipulation using digital workstations, and stores the results on digital tape.
The Cineon.RTM. system, however, has several shortcomings. It is relatively slow with respect to the capture and storage of images. In this regard, one of the bottlenecks of the system can be found in the telecine image conversion system, which utilizes a single trilinear CCD array for image capture. Various additional improvements may also be incorporated, to improve the system's performance, including conversion from film to digital form, manipulation and correction of the digital imagery, compression of the resulting data stream, and storage on a high-capacity, low error rate electronic medium.
Thus, a need exists for an improved telecine having a higher conversion accuracy at a lower cost. Further, a demand remains for an improved telecine having a higher throughput without multiport pattern noise. Moreover, an improved telecine is also of interest to industry which has lower speed film handling to thereby reduce the risks associated with the digital conversion of valuable archival master recordings. There is a further demand for an improved telecine having a longer dwell time per frame enabling the use of slower optical components and thereby reducing cost. Similarly, an improved telecine having a maximized uniform frame illumination is also needed by industry for reducing post acquisition processing. Finally, an improved telecine which records exposure conditions, as well as the state of the recording equipment and film, along with the actual image data, is of great interest to industry for digital archiving purposes.